an innocent girl, as it turned out. That she had also inadvertently brought him into danger made it worse still. She walked past Vicenzo’s house several times, intending to go in, to confess her sin, to beg his forgiveness. But her nerve failed her on each occasion, and she returned home and shut herself away in her bedroom, refusing even to come out for meals.
On the third day, Giovanna grew impatient with her daughter. Instead of leaving her food on a tray outside the door as she had been doing, she barged in and found Isabella lying on her bed in the half-light, her face streaked with tears.
‘What is the matter with you?’ she demanded, putting a cup of coffee on her bedside table. ‘You go out, you come back, you don’t speak, you hardly eat – I’m worried about you.’
‘You shouldn’t be,’ said Isabella self-pityingly. ‘I don’t deserve your sympathy.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ Her mother opened the curtains. ‘It’s a beautiful autumn day out there. Get up, get dressed. Go to the club,’ she urged. ‘See your friends.’
‘No,’ Isabella said gloomily, rolling over away from the bright light. ‘I only get into trouble when I go there.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said her mother briskly. ‘Put on a dress and some lipstick and go!’
The following afternoon, Isabella finally relented and drove to the Acquasanta.
Nothing at the club seemed to have changed. As usual, the tennis pros sat around the bar, chatting with their clients. A bridge game was going on in one corner.
Isabella settled herself on a bar stool and was soon joined by Stefano.
‘Isabella darling,’ he began eagerly. ‘Have you heard the latest?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘but I’m sure you’re going to tell me, anyway.’
‘Well,’ he began, ignoring her barbed comment, ‘I’m not sure if it was that chap we met the other day – Wolff was it? But someone high up in the SS has made a grab for all the Jewish gold in Rome.’
‘What on earth do you mean?’ asked Isabella.
‘The heads of all the Jewish families have had to cough up their gold – fifty kilos of the stuff, I hear. It was either that or…’ He made a swiping gesture across his neck. ‘Drink, darling?’
Isabella thought it unlikely it was an initiative of Wolff’s. He was a senior SS officer, of course, but he had seemed so cultured and charming, honourable even. Surely, she thought, he couldn’t be guilty of common theft.
She joined a game of bridge with a group of elderly women who, to her relief, avoided discussing politics – but she struggled to keep her mind on the game. Life had become a series of complexities, in which no one was as they seemed. Count Ciano, until recently the king of this particular court, and a relative of Mussolini himself, had been banished and was soon, apparently, to be executed. Vittorio Cini, a loyal government minister, had been sent to Dachau. And now, ordinary, good people had been robbed, simply because they were Jewish. No one, it appeared, was safe.
Towards the end of the afternoon, as the sun was setting over the greens, and the golf players began to assemble in the bar, Gianni Cini rushed excitedly into the club lounge. ‘Isabella,’ he called out, ‘I must speak with you.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said to her bridge partners, ‘perhaps you could just play three-handed for a moment?’ She took Gianni’s arm and guided him to a quiet corner of the room where they could talk privately.
‘I’m so glad to see you,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what you did, or who you spoke to, but thank you, thank you.’ He kissed her on both cheeks.
‘Why?’ she asked. ‘What’s happened?’
‘He’s been released! My father is on his way back to Italy now. We had to pay quite a lot of course – family jewels, some artworks – but he’s a free man. And it’s all thanks to you.’
‘Oh I’m so relieved, Gianni. All I did was have a word with a senior German officer I knew.’
‘Thank you,’ he repeated, taking her hands in his and kissing them. ‘And don’t be so modest. You were prepared to stand up for something you believed in, to help a friend. I know what a risk you took, speaking out. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.’
Isabella drove home that evening feeling she had redeemed herself in some small way. Nothing could make up for what she had done to Vicenzo or Livia, but at least